Unmasking Racism

It’s time to teach white male violence

If America’s public schools continue to teach their state’s standardized history curriculum, then we must rename the courses. US History will be rebranded as White American Mythology. Civics will now be taught as Democracy in Theory. As America continues to reckon with its history of racism, our schools cannot continue to support the codified erasure of White people’s role as the architects and enforcers of white supremacy.

Going forward, when we teach about the history of Black American pain, resistance, and joy, we must also teach about the racist White men who committed acts of interpersonal- and systemic injustice. Otherwise, White children will continue to grow up with the belief that racism is a supernatural force when it is actually something that lives in all of our minds, influencing our behaviors in conscious and subconscious ways.

If we don’t change our teaching of history, yet another generation will be denied the right to know that our Founding Fathers weren’t simply products of their time who had no choice but to uphold white supremacy and human enslavement because they could not envision any alternatives. Even if Washington and Jefferson chose to ignore the wails of suffering from their enslaved families, there were White abolitionists, such as Gouverneur Morris, who were present…